Climate Professor Paul Krugman destroys deniers with his knowledge

Professor Krugman: “I’ve spent a lot of the last several days reading about climate change, extreme weather events, food prices, and so on. And one thing that became clear to me is that there’s widespread misunderstanding of the relationship between the gradual trend of rising temperatures and the extreme weather events that have become so much more common. What I’m about to say may seem obvious, because it is obvious, at least if you approach it the right way; but I still think it needs saying.”

“The point is that the usual casual denier arguments — it’s cold outside; you can’t prove that climate change did it — miss the point. What you’re looking for is a pattern. And that pattern is obvious.”

Figure: Last 4-decades of Global Tropical Storm and Hurricane frequency -- 12-month running sums. The top time series is the number of TCs that reach at least tropical storm strength (maximum lifetime wind speed exceeds 34-knots). The bottom time series is the number of hurricane strength (64-knots+) TCs. The added red lines are linear trends, which serve the useful purpose of delineating the respective time-series mean, since they are flat and parallel. Updated through January 31, 2011 -- including Cyclone Yasi but NOT Zaka (12P).

During the last 12-months on planet Earth, 68 tropical cyclones occurred. This is near the record low of 66, which was set last month. Now for over 4-years, global tropical cyclone energy and frequency has plummeted to the lowest levels observed in our historical record.

This is all the evidence that Krugman needs to convince himself of the perils of climate change. Expect to see this (tired) argument parroted throughout the mainstream (liberal) media during the next few days, and when the next storm or weather event pops up. It is almost word for word from the Trenberth AMS talk in Seattle last month.

Let’s hope that Krugman the Great can think for a few more minutes and explain the MWP and why Eric Steig pretended that he did not have a copy of the O’Donnell paper. Krugman might also want to explain how great an adviser to Enron he was, and how come with his great advice, Enron still managed to defraud everyone in sight.

Mr. K. mistakes current events for future probabilities, and bad weather today for the IPCC’s disasters of tomorrow. He writes as if the storms of 2011 are not part of the normal but high end of today but the middle normal of today, with the high end still to come. When the climate shifted, I don’t know.

Well, actually, I never said Global Warming isn’t happening because it’s cold outside today. When I first heard of AGW I said; That’s an interesting idea – let me see your evidence. And then I learned that “the evidence” is “proprietary”, “lost in the office pile of papers”, “accidentally discarded”, “supported by all the experts”, and self evident. To which I still reply; “Let me see your evidence”.

“…widespread misunderstanding of the relationship between the gradual trend of rising temperatures and the extreme weather events that have become so much more common.”

Errr…what??? We’ve had a lot of snow this year in the Northeast but it’s nothing that hasn’t happened before. Ditto for hurricanes, tornadoes, and other weather events.

Unfortunately, Mr. Krugman has unwittingly demonstrated what is SO wrong with climate science today. He, Al Gore, Kevin Trenberth and other climate luminaries go off and make ridiculous statements like this, and no one from the mainstream science community corrects them. Let me know if anyone sees an oped from Schmidt, Hansen, Mann etc. taking Krugman to task on his dubious assertions – it won’t happen. Which is how a lie (or half lie) morphs into the truth in the public arena.

The really scary thing is it generally works! So many of my friends are starting to think I am a loony… let’s not talk about “Climate change” they say, we all know something has to be done to fix it and the best advice the government has is that we need to put a price on carbon, so let’s do it NOW! I just smile and point them to WUWT, Roy Spencer, Richard Lindzen etc. The response? Oh, but they are deniers they must be wrong, they say.

Please keep up the good, clean, sensible work here guys and try to refrain from excessively political rants (which happens very rarely I must say).

It’s odd that the record global high temperature was set on Sept 13th 1922, the record Australian high temperature on Jan 16th 1889, US high temperature on July 10th 1913, Europe high temperature on Aug 4th 1881.

The highest temperature in Antarctica was recorded at Vanda Station on Jan 5th 1974 but no-one was there before 1967.

Shouldn’t we be expecting at least one of these to be broken by relentless global warming?

Unfortunately, the original study did not examine global temperatures, only US temperatures, and used 1950 as a starting point. I’m guessing the 30s and 40s would have been inconvenient for the author’s argument, never mind analysis of global temperatures.

Amazing how he can take a dynamic nonlinear chaotic system and distill it into a simple linear relationship. Seriously though, do you know any other branch of science which is so literally terrified of what it studies?

hmmm.. isn’t it stormier in the winter and finer in the summer …on average? Stormier, more extremes, more extreme variability during the LIA….. and more consistent, less variable with fewer extremes during the middle ages?

Is this post meant to be criticism of Krugman? Krugman is trying to put a simple but subtle idea into layman’s terms. He certainly is not trying to quantify anything here. My experience working with students is that most people won’t understand the graphs and what the shaded areas mean. Hansen’s comparison of climate with loaded dice is probably more effective with the general public.

It is plausible that the recent up tick in extreme weather events is related to climate change. In the statistical sense this may not be demonstrable for a few more years. After Katrina many people wondered if it was caused by or made worse by global warming. Looking back, it probably was not. But, at the time it was a fair question to raise. It may be that ten years from now we will look back a be able to say that no, 2010 was just a fluke. Or, it may be that this time will be seen as the time when extreme weather events started to become increased by global warming.

It is foolish to ignore an obvious peril. It makes sense to invest in better global disaster response. It make sense to think about how to respond to food shortages. Climate change and other factors should lead us to see that the risk of the food shortages may increase. Since all but handful of the qualified experts see GHG emissions as leading to significant climate change, it makes sense to find ways to reduce our GHG emissions. Had we started to do this in the 1990’s we’d be able to breathe much easier now.

“and the extreme weather events that have become so much more common.”

Refer to ‘Carbon Dioxide and Earths Future’ ( Idso) chapters 2 and 3.
Where do these guys get their information. Just a little evidence for this statement please Professor Krugman.
Well said Lattitude and Frank. K

Assume I have 8 coins in a plastic cup, I shake the cup, and drop the coins on the floor. We know that the coins should average 4 heads and 4 tails, but for any given shake, there are times when it’s 8 heads or 8 tails.

Now assume I do the test 5,000 times on a hard floor and only 20 times on carpet. There may be the appearance that carpet is more likely than a hard floor to have heads or tails. However, this is just a random thing due to the limited sample size.

Still, if I want to “prove” that carpet produces more head (or tails) than a hard floor, one can cherry pick the data to make it appear that way. According to Piers Corbyn, roughly 65% of the temperature data is being thrown out or ignored.

The Keynesian economics that professor Krugman is so fond of is proving to be very destructive to our country and the rest of the world. If he is so off base on economics what makes anyone think he knows anything about the climate.

Krugman’s analysis is flawed, and here’s the big fly in that ointment:
According to his Probability Density graph, if the climate cools, there should be near zero extreme events.
Draw a blue bell-curve to the left of the black one.
With the global temperature now in a relative free-fall, there are still extreme events.
And, one further thing about his Probability Density, there’s no room for outliers.
Doesn’t model the real world, and gee whiz, doesn’t predict it either.
Krugman 0: Earth 1

If that’s all there were to it — a normal distribution with a moving mean — wouldn’t the additional “extreme” events all be on one side? and fewer “extreme” events on the other side? But the CAGW mantra is that there will be more droughts AND more floods.

It’s more like the “probability of extreme wild claims by climate alarmists” that happens when one has the “red warming graph” shown above in one’s brain. Mental models can shape how one perceives the world. One can take on a mental model such as the good Professor Krugman does and come up with the thoughts that he utters, the belief stricken do it all the time… the challenge with mental models is that they are not the territory! When the map does not map well or accurately to the objective reality of Nature you’re going to just be making stuff up and others will have no choice but to point this out to you and if you keep making utterances from a mental model that miss maps reality you’re, well, going to get people smiling about you (to be polite about it).

“Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” – Alfred Korzybski

“The meaning of the world is the separation of wish and fact.” – KURT GÖDEL

Unfortunately those spreading “alarm” with climate doomsday scenarios seem to have an endarkened vision of the future that Nature keeps falsifying. Neither the skeptics, “deniers”, alarmists nor even I are the final judge, the Objective Reality of Nature reserves that role exclusively to itself (no entity intended nor implied) and has been doing an exquisite job of educating the alarmists that their soothsaying, ahem, projections are well, falling well neigh on the side of doomsday while Nature is well cycling along just fine as usual.

At it’s core science is skeptical. Consensus is supposed to be derived not from Agreement on Reality but by the validation or refutation of the specific scientific claims being made about Reality that can be OPENLY VERIFIED. The scientist must validate the claims themselves and not just take another scientists word for it on trust, otherwise they fall into the Agreement Reality Trap that politicians and regular mere humans fall into when they agree without actually taking the time to verify the facts themselves.

In science it’s very important to have a mental map that questions the mental map itself! At it’s core science is skeptical. This is why it is so crucial that experimental and observational data are so important, without accurate data one has a much reduced chance of determining if one’s mental map is anywhere near objective reality. Where conclusions are drawn from an incorrect map one is very likely to get it wrong. In rare cases one might be able to guess (e.g. Einstein) but the systems of weather and long term climate are of such complexity that observational data and experimental data are crucial for a comprehensive verifiable attempt to understand the climate of the Earth, Moon, Sol and Milky Way systems and how they influence day to day weather.

The importance of the Scientific Method and the Philosophy of Science can’t be understated. Clearly the good professor needs to bone up on the scientific method and how it works. A few of the aspects of the scientific method that the good professor fails to grasp in his writing and comments are the following:

Quoting from “On Being a Scientist: A Guide to Responsible Conduct in Research: Third Edition (2009) “:

“Though “On Being a Scientist” is aimed primarily at graduate students and beginning researchers, its lessons apply to all scientists at all stages of their scientific careers. In particular, senior scientists have a special responsibility in upholding the highest standards for conduct, serving as role models for students and young scientists, designing educational programs, and responding to alleged violations of ethical norms. Senior scientists can themselves gain a new appreciation for the importance of ethical issues by discussing with their students what had previously been largely tacit knowledge. In the process, they help provide the leadership that is essential for high standards of conduct to be maintained.”

“Given the expectation that data will be accessible, researchers who refuse to share the evidentiary basis behind their conclusions, or the materials needed to replicate published experiments, fail to maintain the standards of science.”

“Some forms of data undergo extensive analysis before being recorded; consequently, sharing those data can require sharing the software and sometimes the hardware used to analyze them.”

“Science is largely a self-regulating community. Though government regulates some aspects of research, the research community is the source of most of the standards and practices to which researchers are expected to adhere.”

“Scientists and their institutions should act to discourage questionable research practices (QRPs) through a broad range of formal and informal methods in the research environment.”

“The circumstances surrounding potential violations of scientific standards are so varied that it is impossible to lay out a checklist of what should be done. Suspicions are best raised in the form of questions rather than allegations. Expressing concern about a situation or asking for clarification generally works better than making charges.”

“Researchers have a professional obligation to perform research and present the results of that research as objectively and as accurately as possible. When they become advocates on an issue, they may be perceived by their colleagues and by members of the public as biased. But researchers also have the right to express their convictions and work for social change, and these activities need not undercut a rigorous commitment to objectivity in research.”

“Over many centuries, researchers have developed professional standards designed to enhance the progress of science and to avoid or minimize the difficulties of research. Though these standards are rarely expressed in formal codes, they nevertheless establish widely accepted ways of doing research and interacting with others. Researchers expect that their colleagues will adhere to and promote these standards. Those who violate these standards will lose the respect of their peers and may even destroy their careers. Researchers have three sets of obligations that motivate their adherence to professional standards.

First, researchers have an obligation to honor the trust that their colleagues place in them. Science is a cumulative enterprise in which new research builds on previous results. If research results are inaccurate, other researchers will waste time and resources trying to replicate or extend those results. Irresponsible actions can impede an entire field of research or send it in a wrong direction, and progress in that field may slow. Imbedded in this trust is a responsibility of researchers to mentor the next generation who will build their work on the current research discoveries.

Second, researchers have an obligation to themselves. Irresponsible conduct in research can make it impossible to achieve a goal, whether that goal is earning a degree, renewing a grant, achieving tenure, or maintaining a reputation as a productive and honest researcher. Adhering to professional standards builds personal integrity in a research career.

Third, because scientific results greatly influence society, researchers have an obligation to act in ways that serve the public. Some scientific results directly affect the health and well-being of individuals, as in the case of clinical trials or toxicological studies. Science also is used by policy makers and voters to make informed decisions on such pressing issues as climate change, stem cell research, and the mitigation of natural hazards. Taxpayer dollars fund the grants that support much research. And even when scientific results have no immediate applications—as when research reveals new information about the universe or the fundamental constituents of matter—new knowledge speaks to our sense of wonder and paves the way for future advances.

By considering all these obligations — toward other researchers, toward oneself, and toward the public — a researcher is more likely to make responsible choices. When beginning researchers are learning these obligations and standards of science, the advising and mentoring of more-experienced scientists is essential.

…

THE TREATMENT Of DATA
In order to conduct research responsibly, graduate students need to understand how to treat data correctly. In 2002, the editors of the Journal of Cell Biology began to test the images in all accepted manuscripts to see if they had been altered in ways that violated the journal’s guidelines. About a quarter of the papers had images that showed evidence of inappropriate manipulation. The editors requested the original data for these papers, compared the original data with the submitted images, and required that figures be remade to accord with the guidelines. In about 1 percent of the papers, the editors found evidence for what they termed “fraudulent manipulation” that affected conclusions drawn in the paper, resulting in the papers’ rejection.

Researchers who manipulate their data in ways that deceive others, even if the manipulation seems insignificant at the time, are violating both the basic values and widely accepted professional standards of science. Researchers draw conclusions based on their observations of nature. If data are altered to present a case that is stronger than the data warrant, researchers fail to fulfill all three of the obligations described at the beginning of this guide. They mislead their colleagues and potentially impede progress in their field or research. They undermine their own authority and trustworthiness as researchers. And they introduce information into the scientific record that could cause harm to the broader society, as when the dangers of a medical treatment are understated.

This is particularly important in an age in which the Internet allows for an almost uncontrollably fast and extensive spread of information to an increasingly broad audience. Misleading or inaccurate data can thus have far-reaching and unpredictable consequences of a magnitude not known before the Internet and other modern communication technologies.

Misleading data can arise from poor experimental design or careless measurements as well as from improper manipulation. Over time, researchers have developed and have continually improved methods and tools designed to maintain the integrity of research. Some of these methods and tools are used within specific fields of research, such as statistical tests of significance, double-blind trials, and proper phrasing of questions on surveys. Others apply across all research fields, such as describing to others what one has done so that research data and results can be verified and extended.

Because of the critical importance of methods, scientific papers must include a description of the procedures used to produce the data, sufficient to permit reviewers and readers of a scientific paper to evaluate not only the validity of the data but also the reliability of the methods used to derive those data. If this information is not available, other researchers may be less likely to accept the data and the conclusions drawn from them. They also may be unable to reproduce accurately the conditions under which the data were derived.

The best methods will count for little if data are recorded incorrectly or haphazardly. The requirements for data collection differ among disciplines and research groups, but researchers have a fundamental obligation to create and maintain an accurate, accessible, and permanent record of what they have done in sufficient detail for others to check and replicate their work. Depending on the field, this obligation may require entering data into bound notebooks with sequentially numbered pages using permanent ink, using a computer application with secure data entry fields, identifying when and where work was done, and retaining data for specified lengths of time. In much industrial research and in some academic research, data notebooks need to be signed and dated by a witness on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, beginning researchers often receive little or no formal training in recording, analyzing, storing, or sharing data. Regularly scheduled meetings to discuss data issues and policies maintained by research groups and institutions can establish clear expectations and responsibilities.”

Mike says:
February 8, 2011 at 6:27 pm
It is plausible that the recent up tick in extreme weather events is related to climate change.
==================================================
Mike, could you please provide any reference to any up tick in any extreme weather event.

But. But. But. It ain’t getting no warmer no more. The trend has reached its end. That pattern no longer matters, for the warm has left the farm. They need to hush, rest on their laurels, and wait for the warming to come back. But, alack and alas, they’ve pushed it too far and their laurels are bitten by frost.

If you didn’t know it, I once was a poet, and none could be found who was finer. But Anthony’s blog has cleared up the fog, and now I’m climate denier.

Reminds me of an old Anacin (or Bufferin, etc.) commercial with [ostensibly] a medical professional in a white lab coat holding a clipboard next to an animation of a graph showing how their analgesic “gets to your headache 47% faster than the leading aspirin”.

Breathtaking that Krugman didn’t conceive, even if his graph is correct, that it would mean fewer cold-related “extreme” events to counter increased heat-related events. I thought of it as soon as I looked at his chart as did several of the other people here.

Alas, we aren’t Nobel-prize material….

Of course, greenhouse gases should produce more warmth when the humidity is low – at the poles and during the winter. I highly doubt that we need to worry much about “extreme” heat related events during the winter.

Because of the recent weather events in Australia and stupid comments similar to Krugman’s being discussed in Australian media ,JoNova has come up with this brilliant post on her site. Well worth reading

Perhaps the most common “extreme event” is a Tropical Cyclone/Hurricane/Typhoon, which of course suck up tremendous amounts of excess heat energy and turn it into wind energy, etc. Since Paul Krugman’s graphical example shows a shift to higher temperatures, we should be seeing more of Cyclonic Energy, right?

But Global Accumlated Cyclone Energy (ACE) is at record lows and has a slight downtrend.

So if Paul Krugman’s theory about fat tails is correct, then the temperature pdf should be shifted to the left, not the right, based upon the ACE data.

That would mean we should be seeing more extreme cold events, like blizzards and snowfall in otherwise warm places.

Has anyone noticed if that is happening during the Northern Hemisphere winter at all?

Unsurprisingly, Paul “Enron” Krugman, possibly the most often-wrong economist in America, spends several days researching a subject and his main take-away is the opposite of reality.

Just to sum things up.

If I (perish the thought) won a Nobel prize, I would take the cash but throw the little statue in the trash on the way out. And I would *never* mention it again, lest I lose all credibility in more refined circles.

Even assuming he is correct it still only would show that the planet is getting warmer. It does not prove AGW is causing the heating. But if I remember correctly the heat content in the oceans have flattlined for 6 years so what exactly did he “prove” that was so obvious?

After reading the article and finding it without any substance, I especially loved this post in the NYTimes
Julian Eaton
Weehawken, New Jersey
February 8th, 2011
9:20 amA cogent & effective breakdown! If this concise argument doesn’t assuage climate change deniers, then nothing will!

I guess an education and understanding of science and engineering handicaps those of us who can immediately see through Krugman’s article, specifically it is nothing short of ridiculous for it’s lack of data or logic connecting his claim that slight temperature increases cause more extreme events. Is he totally unaware of the data on Hurricanes, that is obvious to anyone living on the east coast?
His curve is just a pure fabrication, no wonder his economics is similarly screwed up.

I wonder if his curves will merit a Nobel Prize in Science. After all Gore got one for similar fabrications.

“[ryanm: how do you quantify a recent “uptick” — just asking]” This was in response to my comment above @February 8, 2011 at 6:27 pm. A few others asked this as well. Below are some examples.

The 2010 heat wave: 7 excruciating climate records
Los Angelenos have been burning up — but they’re not the only ones who have endured unprecedented temperatures this past year
posted on September 28, 2010, at 11:22 AM

Although precipitation has increased in many areas of the globe, the area under drought has also increased. Drought duration and intensity has also increased. While regional droughts have occurred in the past, the widespread spatial extent of current droughts is broadly consistent with expected changes in the hydrologic cycle under warming. Water vapour increases with increasing global temperature, due to increased evaporation where surface moisture is available, and this tends to increase precipitation. However, increased continental temperatures are expected to lead to greater evaporation and drying, which is particularly important in dry regions where surface moisture is limited.

Last fall I posted a blog about the unusual number and severity of extreme weather events that have been striking around the globe for the past several years. That entry focused on the alternating severe drought and heavy flooding in Atlanta in 2007-2009 as an example of the roller coaster ride that climate change is likely to be. As every dutiful scientist does, I stopped short of blaming those individual weather events on global warming, but I am also careful to point out that it is scientifically unsound to claim that the confluence of extreme weather events in recent years is not associated with global warming; I’ll return to this question later. […] Returning to the question everyone wants answered: What can we say about the connection between these events and climate change? As usual, there is no definitive answer about these specific events, but direct observations show that extreme weather events have become more frequent in the past half-century, and in the extreme cases that have been studied, the mechanisms are those that one would expect from global warming.

Most people have not taken calculus or statistics. While one could explain to them what a bell curve is and how the area under it represents probability this would take some time and Krugman did not do this. Hansen’s loaded dice comparison is something almost anyone can understand.

As for arguments from authority, they are used constructively all the time. If your mechanic says you need a new transmission and you don’t know much about cars you might get a couple more expert opinions, and if they agree you get the new transmission. Suppose instead you then went to a blog run by someone who had not studied auto repair, does not read standard auto mechanics magazines because he does not want to pay for them, does not have diagnostic equipment, and he tells you the bad transition stuff is a lie and you should not worry one wit about the funny noises coming from your car. Who would you believe?

Most people do not have the training to follow the science in any depth. For them the issue is figuring out who to trust. I am not saying they should blindly trust authority. They should be skeptical and ask questions. But that is not what is going on on this blog or others like it.

The trouble with his little graph example is the Earth has now been verified to be cooling and his red curve is moving to the left, not right. What a devious a–. Whatever respect I held for him is forever gone.

As the AGW cult collapses and loses members that have been successfully de-programmed either on their own intelligence or with the help of concerned friends and family, we should see more of these authoritative Cardinal figures appearing on the scene in an attempt to slow the mass exit, you can bet on it!

“The point is that the usual casual denier arguments — it’s cold outside; you can’t prove that climate change did it — miss the point. What you’re looking for is a pattern. And that pattern is obvious.”

“casual denier arguments”? Just what are casual arguments? I suppose the casual insult term “denier” counts along with ‘its getting warm outside’ is another and proving climate change did ‘it’ did what exactly? Climate does change, its what climate does and has always done, no stasis with climate or weather just constant natural cyclic change. Krugman cannot even tell the difference between climate change and CAGW, one is a fact and one is a theory.

“what you,re looking for is a pattern” And BINGO we have found a pattern straight away and no super computer models are needed at all! The pattern is ‘natural cyclic climate variation’ and guess what? We have evidence that NCCV has been happening for hundreds of millions of years. So in fact the pattern we are looking for is right there under our noses and has been all along, thanks to Mr Krugman we have found it.

The pattern is natural and cyclic, three cheers for Mr Krugman who has just found the answer we have all been looking for.

“And one thing that became clear to me is that there’s widespread misunderstanding of the relationship between the gradual trend of rising temperatures and the extreme weather events that have become so much more common.”

He shoots and he scores, boy this guy is smokin today eh? Yes there has been a great deal of misunderstanding and much is based around flawed computer models, the relationship between temperature and weather events is a great place to start because there is an inverse relationship so no wonder it has been misunderstood, the warmer(as measured by warmists) it gets the fewer storms we see and the less power and intensity they are showing, so the models were wrong, we see the opposite effect occurring, Mr Krugman does it again.

Here we have a man that claims to see the pattern, a pattern that we cannot and a pattern for which the evidence is non existent. The priests of ancient Greece and Rome would divine the future by examining the fresh entrails of a goat or chicken, ordinary people could not see this but the priests could.

I see a pattern in the clouds right now, if you were to look from a short distance away you would never see my pattern at all and the question is who is right and who is the denier? The urge to see pattern in nature from cloud gazing to goat entrails to the climate is as old as humanity, Mr Krugman sees because he wants to see, he believes so he cannot see that others cannot see and he cannot accept he may be mistaken so he attacks others who fail to see and fail to believe.

I fail to see the pattern so I am a denier of the faith/truth, the cloud he is so sure has a definite pattern is simply a cloud to me therefore I am a denier of the truth as he believes it to be.

So a big thank you to Mr Krugman, he has explained his position so well it cannot fail to recruit more sceptics, it is in fact the finest way to make an open minded person veer toward scepticism. A prize for services to climate realism should be sent to Krugman ASAP, he fully deserves it.

Dan Lee says:
February 8, 2011 at 6:05 pm
And the solution to high food prices due to “bad weather” is what? To make food prices even higher by increasing the cost of the fuel needed to get it to market?

This guy’s an economist?

More like a political reassurance man. Have watched him before on other topics.
Delivers with a monolith stone face.

Couldn’t Krugman achieve the same result by simply changing the variance (shape of the curve) around the “mean?” Or by using a asymmetrical curve? Why move the curve? There are all kinds of different ways you can make up the answer…

Droughts happen just as floods happen as weather patterns go through their unstoppable paths. I can’t believe they still use weather events to prop up the failing theory of global warming. The climate has been changing for 5 billion years on this planet…and the fact that it changes a little within 100 years is suddenly a big deal……The entire name of climate change is missing the boat…its global warming and it has always been. Ask any of the public…thats what they know it as. Climate will continue to change as it always does whether Man is here or not. We can’t stop it.

Every prediction is based upon what is the most famous weather event of the time, and hence if something happens, by golly it must be global warming. We have all been through this, and the more they publicize the weakness of their theory by pointing to tragedies and saying “hey that is global warming” the stupider they will look.

I can’t wait for these charletons to be thrown into the street and given jobs that they can do to some degree.

I am pretty sure they can all say “Would you like fries with that” pretty well. Abusing statistics and such since their theories did not pan out since 2003 is the sure sign that they couldn’t even admit they were wrong. If they commited crimes after that date in order to cover-up their mistakes instead of simply admitting they were wrong… I hope they do meet Bubba and Bubba makes some good friends.

Science is going down the drain as time drags on. I used to think the Virginia thing was a bad idea, but over the last few months I have started to come around. Maybe the useful idiots who post here and elsewhere talking about how weather means climate when they mean it does can also get their just-deserts. They can also probably say “would you like fries with that.”

Maybe I am rambling a little…but posts such as Mike bring this out in me. I Appologize to all except those idiots who still believe we are warming up. .7C in a century is very scary now….

[ryanm: the NCEP GFS model generates the Latent Heat flux products using the typical bulk formulation. The Arctic blasts, one after another, behind the powerful extratropical cyclones in the Atlantic are being modified by the warmer ocean surface…Hence, strong, almost extreme upward LH flux. I updated the graphics through 192 hours, and made them bigger]

Basic question – has Krugman justified the depiction of a straight right-shift of his imaginary distribution? Why has he kept the same shape? Why not a flattening of the peak and increasing events on both tails? Why is it depicted as a symmetrical distribution?

Looks like pure guesswork with no scientific basis. The sort of thing that they wish to attack others for. But the good consensus will stay silent on this, rather than pointing out the weakness of the arguments behind the misleading hype.

The “bell shaped” curve figures are interesting. Most likely the probability distribution is a normal or probably even a log-normal distribution, not the near Lorentzian that he has drawn. However, I’m sure it’s just an “eye guide”. My issue with his idea is that the distribution will simply shift upward. How does he know this? How does he know it won’t just be a broading or even decrease in width? Or a shift and decrease in width? Or an increase in height? There’re three parameters in a normal probabilty distribution. And he knows exactly how each will respond to global warming?

Looks like more simplistic handwaiving in lieu of real scientific discourse.

“The storm god is unhappy with your sins and will punish you with thunder and rain. Fire god will rain burning rocks and lava on you. Sungod will withhold food from you and devastate your crops. Sea god will lift the seas and bring a flood upon your houses! Humans, lower your voices, prostrate yourselves, seek not knowledge, be poor…and appease the gods, their prophets and the kings”

See how much humanity has progressed in the last 5000 years…theocracy all over again and all because they want to make a little money from a trace gas.

Surely we get “extreme” weather events at both ends of that distribution? Those associated with heat at one end (hurricanes) and those associated with cold at the other (ice fairs on the Thames). By shifting to the “hot” end we’ll have the same amount of extreme events but the balance will change?

To Rbateman, BaaHumbug and others who have discussed the pdf of global weather at the top of the article:

This was the first thing that jumped out at me, too. If the most often-occurring weather is ‘normal’ weather, then that’s around about the mode on the diagram. Thus, both tails represent ‘extremes’ of weather. So, shifting the curve has no effect on the frequency of extreme events – it just changes their character.

Assuming of course you can boil down climate to a single axis like that.

Every time one of these idiots opens there mouth and says something like this it just brings down the reputation of all science.

I am reminded of one animal documentary where some fruit tree dropped fermenting fruit onto the group – to be eaten by animals from baboons to elephants, which then wondered around in a drunken state to the hilarity of the audience.

The pickings were just too rich and they couldn’t help making a fool of themselves.

Global weather is that fruit tree and this is one more who has taken too much and is talking gibberish.

“…Second, no individual weather event can properly be said to have been “caused” by global warming. Heat waves happened 30 years ago; there’s no way to prove that any individual heat wave now might not have happened even if we hadn’t emitted all that CO2.

But the pattern should have changed: we should be getting lots of record highs, and not as many record lows — which is exactly what we do see. And we should be seeing 100-year heat waves and similar events much more often than history would have suggested likely; again, that’s what we actually do see…”

Maybe someone needs to re-define the “100-year event” they’re tossing around. If the Weather Service Records only go back 180 years or so, exactly how many “100 year events” should we have seen?

BTW, from Wikipedia:

“…The extreme value analysis only considers the most extreme event observed in a given year. So, between the large spring runoff and a heavy summer rain storm, whichever resulted in more runoff would be considered the extreme event, while the smaller event would be ignored in the analysis (even though both may have been capable of causing terrible flooding in their own right)…”

So, according to this idea, there can only be ONE 100-year event per year – worldwide. But to pad their numbers, they may consider each storm – by city, county, state, country, region – to be 100 year events.

“…There are a number of assumptions which are made to complete the analysis which determines the 100-year flood.

First, the extreme events observed in each year, must be independent from year-to-year. In other words the maximum river flow rate from 1984, can not be found to be significantly correlated with the observed flow rate in 1985. 1985 can not be correlated with 1986, and so forth.

The second assumption is that the observed extreme events must come from the same probability distribution function.

The third assumption is that the probability distribution relates to the largest storm (rainfall or river flow rate measurement) that occurs in any one year.

The fourth assumption is that the probability distribution function is stationary, meaning that the mean (average), standard deviation and max/min values are not increasing or decreasing over time. This concept is referred to as stationarity…”

So if the temps are changing, then one cannot assume that the historical data are, or can be, considered valid as input into the extreme event analysis.

As a caveat to the above, if you take a normal distribution and shift the mean/mode in one direction, you can increase the area under the extremes. So if you take a normal distribution with mean 0 and sd of 0.5, you get 2.3% of the curve above 1 or below -1 (4.6% “extreme events”). If you now shift the mean to 0.1, you get 3.6% of the curve above 1 and 1.4% below -1 (5% “extreme events”). If now you shift the mean/mode to 1, you get 50% of the curve exceeding 1, so 50% “extreme events”.

This all assumes a normal distribution, and that the mode/mean is exactly between the two definitions of “extreme events” to begin with.

The fact that more weather events, among other things, are reported by the media is a function of a more global media coverage surely?

I would also opine that the global media has a predilection for reporting weather events because they are visually dramatic and have a big human interest content. I don’t even want to consider that there may be underlying sinister reasons for the media to carry these stories.

Today it is virtually impossible for a severe weather event to go unnoticed by the news aware people anywhere. In the past TV coverage was limited and the news was often local or at best regional whilst today the news is global. Here I get CNN, BBC, SKY, AJ, RTE, CCN over and above my local stations. All of these channels carry similar or identical coverage of floods, hurricanes, blizzards and so on from almost everywhere.

Because of this one gets the impression that the world is in continual meteorological turmoil and because I don’t recall this being the case when I was younger and when this country had little global news coming in it seems much worse now.

Having said all of that my own local weather seems no more or less extreme than ever it did. We get a few major downpours each year during our rainy season, every few years we get a cyclone coming in from the East, some winters are colder than others with the occasional frost but our last reported snow here was in 1948 and there are signs of glacier activity in some parts. I am a civil engineer and I have been involved with the design and construction of dams and related infrastructure here in Zimbabwe for 40 years and none of the design parameters for runoff have had to be bumped up to accommodate more extreme conditions let alone more frequent flooding.

The media has a great power over our perception of things but one has to be critical, skeptical even, to make sure we aren’t be led by letting other people think on our behalf.

The point is heightened awareness thanks to better global weather news gathering doesn’t mean there has been an “uptick” in extreme weather events. You can see that by simply, as was done with the QLD flooding, going back through the records nothing unprecedented is going on.

If “extremes” are direct result of absolute local temperature, how come our summers are not full of extremes compared to winters, since summers are on average warmer by 20°C than winters?
If “extremes” are direct result of absolute global temperature, how come NH summer are not full of extremes compared to winter, since the global temperature during the NH summers is by 4 °C warmer than during NH winters?
If December global average was lower than monthly global averages in 1940-45, how come there are “more extremes” now?

Its interesting first there was “CO2 global warming” with milder winters forecast and less rain (droughts) so on. Well that did not work.

Lets try climate change – yes but that inferred much the same yet we were seeing freezing temperatures.

Well lets try saying “ Scientists have been saying for decades……………..” sounds good except they haven’t.

Lets also say that warming means cooling or freezing as well (Al Gore).

That’s not working so now its “extreme events” Pathetic !!

Any weather event is now “CO2 global warming” wet, cold, drought, fires, heat wave, floods, cyclones. Grasshopper beliefs based on climate astrology. A pile of horse dung the same shape as the “probability” curve. What heap of poo.

“Most people do not have the training to follow the science in any depth. For them the issue is figuring out who to trust. I am not saying they should blindly trust authority. They should be skeptical and ask questions. But that is not what is going on on this blog or others like it.”

What you say would appear to true of at least one semi frequent commenter here.

Remember that we are talking about a temperature rise over the last 100 years of 0.35%…. OMG we’re all going to die…. how did I reach that figure…. using science and the great work of William Thompson, First Lord Kelvin…. Kelvin… remember Kelvin…. average temperature of planet Earth… 15 C = 288K.

Temperature rise 1C = 1K…. therefore % increase = 1K/288K = 0.35%….

P.S. TSI varies by about 3W/m2….. therefore %change in TSI is 3/1300 = 0.23%. Clearly the Sun has no role in AGW (sarc)

Mike says: “If your mechanic says you need a new transmission and you don’t know much about cars you might get a couple more expert opinions, and if they agree you get the new transmission.”

You are opening yourself up to getting ripped off. I have seen the TV exposures of rip-off mechanics, where a TV crew with an expert mechanic take a car with one simple problem to a large number of garages to see if the garage only fixes the problem, or invents loads of new ones to fix, thus increasing their own revenue. In these exposures, most garages ripped people off.

The trick with car maintenance (for the non-mechanically minded) is asking around everyone else you know to discover which mechanic can be trusted. Even posting details of whatever problem you are having with your car onto car forums and getting independent advice.

For example, my car recently developed a problem with the anti-lock brakes. At low speed the brakes would judder as if the ABS was activated, and at speeds above 30MPH the ABS system would shut down.

According to the main dealers for my type of car, I needed a new drive-shaft costing about 350 pounds to replace. According to several other garages, they said the same thing.

According to “independent” experts online, who had NOTHING financial to gain from their advice, they said that there is an ABS sensor ring on the drive-shaft that is probably cracked, giving a false reading, leading to the ABS system shutting down. If that ring is replaced, then the problem would be fixed and it would be a lot less expense.

I took my car to a local independent garage who I have trusted for many years, told them the symptoms of the problem, and without me even telling them that I know about the ABS ring on the drive-shaft, that is exactly what they said it would be and they replaced just that ring, for seventy two pounds. My car is now fixed.

That garage is honest and only interested in the truthful remedy for real and known problems.

Your advice would have cost me much much more than is necessary.

The same is true with “climate experts”. They are making a load of money from their fearmongering, so I am automatically suspicious. When their doom-laden prophecies are NOT coming true, and the rate of warming this century has NOT kept pace with what is necessary to create the 4 – 6 degrees warming by 2100, then I am no longer going to take the word of such “scientists” When I discover that such scientists have ignored the scientific method, acted in unprofessional ways in relation to bullying journals and editors, hidden data, deleted data and cherry-picked convenient data whilst ignoring other relevant data, then I do not trust such scientists at all.

They are the equivalent to cowboy mechanics. But then you would rather I trusted them and got ripped off!

“The meaning of the world is the separation of wish and fact.” – KURT GÖDEL

I find thta when people first read it they don’t grasp its implications, to be honest after a decade of having this among my top ten aphorisms I am STILL finding new depths to its meaning.

The Korzybski quote on maps and territories is also apposite for computer modelling.
Maps are oftern useful – to the extent they share a structural similarity to the reality, but missleading to the extent they omit or distort what they portray.

Krugman’s graph is simplistic as others have pointed out, and it is based on the underlying premise that warmer temperatures result in more extreme weather in the form of droughts, floods and storms.

There is a way to test this assumption from real-world evidence, at least on a small temporal scale and at slightly less than global extent.
The El Nino/La Nina cycles might show more extreme weather during the warmer El Nino phase if warming does increase the probability of extreme events.
If the graph of storms in the article above shows any correlation with the ENSO cycle, and that is also present in drought and flood records it would be prima facia evidence that warmer temperatures are linked with more extreme weather.

Billy Liar says:
February 8, 2011 at 6:13 pm
It’s odd that the record global high temperature was set on Sept 13th 1922, the record Australian high temperature on Jan 16th 1889, US high temperature on July 10th 1913, Europe high temperature on Aug 4th 1881.

The highest temperature in Antarctica was recorded at Vanda Station on Jan 5th 1974 but no-one was there before 1967.

Shouldn’t we be expecting at least one of these to be broken by relentless global warming?

———————-

Amazing how if you cherry pick the continents you can find no warming.

Here’s the Uk’s record temps for you:

England: 38.5C 101.3F in Brogdale, near Faversham, Kent on 10 August 2003

Wales: 35.2C 95.4F in Hawarden Bridge, Flintshire on 2 August 1990

Scotland: 32.9C 91.2F in Greycrook, Scottish Borders on 9 August 2003

You must now agree that based on this data the last two decades have been the warmest on record and this proves that global warming is happening. /sarc

Yeah, I watched it when broadcast and immediately thought ‘what about the reduction in extreme events at the other end of the graph?’ See – they have drawn it as a ‘shift’ to the right – but to do that, requires there be no or many less extreme events at the other end. Logically, in practise, surely the curve will simply be spread out a ‘little’ more and squashed or flattenend at its peak?
And of course, this all assumes that we know what the normal distribution is! or what the maximum ‘normal’ extreme events are – which we don’t – at least not in a timescale of 150 years of records!
Its like saying our earth is an average size planet – (well it is to us I s’pose) – but until we started to see other sizes of objects, planets and stars, that may have been a reasonable assumption (but an assumption nonetheless) – except that nowadays we KNOW that we are but a tiny speck compared to other objects.
this is a good video of that point.

Thank you for making this point very clear. It is a matter of common sense that neither a majority nor a minority is any guide to whether a group of advisers are right. Quantity is not quality. We even have simple catch-phrases for this common sense notion. We want “the top man” not the “mediocre average”.

The fact that AGW advocates so often rely on this “majority opinion” fallacy is indicative of just how WEAK their case is, if they can’t think of anything better than to just cite a fallacious argument.

Plus it spreads brain rot. In another topic I already start hearing people talk about the “vast weight of overwhelming consensus” as if that was a valid argument. It is frankly making everyone dumb.

Economists who live in Egypt have commented on the migration of millions of young people to urban areas, leading to labor shortages and decreasing the production of food staples, which led to the rise in food prices in Egypt. They live there and have been studying the specific situation for more than a few months.

Also: can Kruger provide the figures for the trend in food production worldwide to prove that “climate change” is leading to a decrease in total food produced?

Mike, what is it that you see on WUWT that most of us regulars don’t? I find your posts to be mostly appeals to often dubious or even fraudulent authority, and that you regularly imply that few of us can think or reason without the aid or instructions from that authority. Your use of the ‘precautionary principle’ is specious too, and excellent arguments against it abound.
I don’t have a science degree, but by examining Krugman’s arguments I am convinced that Krugman is talking nonsense, nonsense which ignores actual measurement, records of those measurements and trends derived from the records. His record as an advisor to Enron does not recommend him to me, either.
Or have I missed something that is obvious to you but not to me?

This makes no sense… why should a change in temperature imply a change in the probability of an “extreme event”, globally speaking? His whole argument implicitly assumes that there is some sort of optimum temperature for minimizing the probability of these extreme events (since they can occur at colder temperatures as well the temperature scale must be a deviation from this optimum, so the curves should not be Gaussian but Poissonian or Binomial or something). As the Earth warms then some locations must move *towards* the optimium as well as other locations moving away from it… so why the heck does he imagine that his argument stands up? I’d expect such basic conceptual errors from a journalist or other person untrained in distributions or calculus. But this guy is supposed to have a Nobel prize in a vaguely quantitative discipline (which I assume means he spent more than a few days reading up on!)!

Krugman…. It never ceases to amaze me.. how the demonstration of belief , argued vehemently, can be so completely devoid of the requisite facts..
Like saying the my electric Bill should not go up in the summer, because I never change my thermostat.(FLorida air conditioning performance and rates of radiant conductive heat gain as my point)
SO I will say It.. He is a strange Angry Bearded little man.. and I heard he smells like feta cheese and old couch(I heard it so it must be true.)

That very argument showing the bell-shaped graph of temperatures was used by the BBC in their TV program about disappearing belief in science (already reported and slated on this site)

That moving the whole of the temperature curve up slightly increases the probablitity of extreme weather considerably is a total leap of faith. Where is the evidence that temperature distribution world-wide is an exact bell curve, let alone that it might stay the same shape if the earth as a whole warmed up ? Bonkers argument. Totally unsubstantiated and virtually unprovable.

Like Simon Hopkinson, I saw this diagram on Ben Miller’s Horizon programme. It smelt wrong to me then and it still smells wrong.
I decided to follow my nose (and Ryan’s link above) to Klugman’s original article and ended up surrounded by more holes than you’d find in a Swiss cheese.
I understand the principle of the bell curve and I am quite happy to accept Professor Klugman’s suggestion that as the temperature increases so the distribution curve will shift right. I am also prepared to accept the concept of a “threshold” beyond which there will be events that can be described as “extreme”.
But this is where the Professor and I part company because I am not prepared, as he would like, to “define an extreme event as a case in which the temperature exceeds some threshold.”
That is not a scientific request, statement, or hypothesis. The Professor has missed out several rather important stages in the argument. While he tries to convince me that there is a “relationship between the gradual trend of rising temperatures and … extreme weather events” he does not attempt to make any case — convincing or otherwise — for what these events might be. He is, I assume though he doesn’t say so, trying to leave me with the impression that the 2003 European and the 2010 Russian heatwaves, and the 2010 and 2011 floods in Pakistan and Australia together with assorted other “events” that “have become so much more common” are due to global warming.
But nowhere does he make any attempt to support this statement nor the link; they are merely assertions, and the only source he quotes for an increase in the number of temperature events beyond his threshold is a cherry-picked chart from climateprogress.org giving a ratio of record highs vs record lows in the US since 1950.
Pity that 1930s and 1940s aren’t included; it might tell a different story.
So all I end up with is a chart that tells me that in a warming world I will see more warmer days and that more of these will be warmer than some arbitrary “threshold” and …. that’s it!
Sorry, Professor. Try again.

Astonishing ignorance and arrogance of Professor. Why he supposes that frequency distribution of extremal events follows Gaussian bell-curve? It is well known that it does not, and appropriate distribution is hyperbolic (Zipf’s law). Climate is a system, not an assemblage of independent random variables. Gaussian statistics is not applicable to behavior of complex systems.

Krugman, our own Mike and fellow AGW propagandists (who I don’t feel entirely believe their own assertions for some reason), would do well to read the speech of another great nobel prize winner, then take a long cold look at the level of certainty and observational evidence (as opposed to empty assertion, tautology and spin) in their prognostications:

The man bent over, squeezed between his height extenders and crawled upwards. It took some fierce pushing but once inside, darkness fell but the sounds made it an alien disillusion.

Where can a bean counter go to count the missing beans?

The knowledge of his own abyss came with the pressing matter. Had it not starred back at him before he entered? He was sure of it. Which meant, he might be in the right place after all.

Beans are beans in all matter of shapes and forms, it don’t matter non.

Trying to make heads and tails of it all he went on the offensive with the last great push. The best defense is offense! He was so deep inside now, so far up his own outgassing facility he could even feel his intestines when his bowl moved.

And move it did! But was it in defense of violation of this most horrid of misaligned yoga position or was it himself delivering an epiphany by proxy of once read beans?

Everybody who knows something about stastistics and meteorology should know the classical paper on Nile floods. There is a very long time series record of Nile peak levels, and on the basis of this record for the fist time the Zipf’s law was established outside the realm of linguistics. After this, the same distribution was found in occurence of earthquakes by magnitude, distribution of biological species by taxonomy and many other systemic features.

Wow, he has spent several days reading about climate change. He must be ready for his PhD then. There is a gradual trend of rising temperatures but it is from about 1600. Plot the monthly HadCRUT3 data. There has been no warming since Jan 1998. Fact. Carbon dioxide levels have risen by about 26 ppm since then. Fact.

i love the fact that we live in an age now, where some so called expert pulls rank over our own sense of touch. yes, when you walk outside and it’s -35 and you feel the cold, it’s really not cold, it’s warm. Why is it warm? because the expert told us so!. Even though, the frigged temperatures cracked the engine block on your car and caused water pipes in your house to burst…. it’s still warm. Even though, today, they are currently warning people to not expose bare skin to these temperatures for longer than 15 minutes or the result will be frost bite….. it’s still warm. Want the truth about global warming or climate change or climate truthiness? walk out side and use your fuckin’ common sense.

The 2010 heat wave: 7 excruciating climate records
Los Angelenos have been burning up — but they’re not the only ones who have endured unprecedented temperatures this past year
posted on September 28, 2010, at 11:22 AM

Weather is not climate. These heat records prove global warming no more than cold records in winter prove global cooling. You are aware of the El Nino that has persisted for the previous two years?

February 24, 2010
Update on Global Drought Patterns

Although precipitation has increased in many areas of the globe, the area under drought has also increased. Drought duration and intensity has also increased. While regional droughts have occurred in the past, the widespread spatial extent of current droughts is broadly consistent with expected changes in the hydrologic cycle under warming. Water vapour increases with increasing global temperature, due to increased evaporation where surface moisture is available, and this tends to increase precipitation. However, increased continental temperatures are expected to lead to greater evaporation and drying, which is particularly important in dry regions where surface moisture is limited.

Did you read that article? It quotes extensively from “A major article on global-scale drought has appeared recently in the Journal of Climate by drought experts from Princeton University and the University of Washington; the work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.” That report found that “Globally, the mid-1950s showed the highest drought activity and the mid-1970s to mid-1980s the lowest activity.”

In essence, it says once again that what the IPCC predicted was not found to be true when the reality was actually studied.

Last fall I posted a blog about the unusual number and severity of extreme weather events that have been striking around the globe for the past several years. That entry focused on the alternating severe drought and heavy flooding in Atlanta in 2007-2009 as an example of the roller coaster ride that climate change is likely to be. As every dutiful scientist does, I stopped short of blaming those individual weather events on global warming, but I am also careful to point out that it is scientifically unsound to claim that the confluence of extreme weather events in recent years is not associated with global warming; I’ll return to this question later. […] Returning to the question everyone wants answered: What can we say about the connection between these events and climate change? As usual, there is no definitive answer about these specific events, but direct observations show that extreme weather events have become more frequent in the past half-century, and in the extreme cases that have been studied, the mechanisms are those that one would expect from global warming.

This article claims that there has been an “unusual number and severity of extreme weather events around the globe,” but nowhere does it provide evidence that this statement is true. The links provided as evidence within the article merely restate the original premise and offer no actual evidence. For example, the main article highlights “extreme weather events have become more frequent” with this URL, but that link connects to an article that only restates the premise again, and even offers outright falsehoods: “The power and frequency of Atlantic hurricanes have increased substantially in recent decades.” This is directly contradicted by the latest report on global tropical cyclone activity, which states: “Global Tropical Cyclone Accumulated Cyclone Energy [ACE] remains lowest in at least three decades, and expected to decrease even further.”

It’s easy to find media reports of heat waves, droughts, melting glaciers, disappearing ice caps; once one looks at the actual studies done on these phenomena a different picture usually appears. Heat waves caused by El Ninas, a naturally-occuring event not related to “climate change”; glaciers retreating in some locations, but growing in others; winds blowing ice out of the area, and not melting at all. The list goes on and on. It’s always better to look at the primary sources for scientific information rather than to rely on press releases.

One would have expected better from a Nobel Laureate, although admittedly many economics laureates do not have a good track record when trying to undersatnd the real world in which we live (e.g. Scholes and Merton and Long Term Capital Management). However, for Krugman to stipulate a Gaussian distribution and then to shift it to the right without affecting the pattern in any other way is making not one but several assumptions which have yet to be proven is a shoddy piece of work.

Mike the article you quoted on droughts does not say there is an up tick. It does provide some interesting data. Look at the conclusion and you will read>

‘The IPCC and the global warming alarmists continue to insist that droughts are becoming more frequent, more intense, more spatially extensive, and of longer duration. However, Sheffield et al. analyzed drought patterns at the global scale for the period 1950 to 2000, and found no evidence to support claims of increasing drought activity.

Enough said. ‘

Your third reference links to speculation by a scientist. But, the scientist provides zero data to support the speculation. Whenever I have looked for data on increases of extreme events I find that the alamist lacks useful data. They can cite cherry picked events which can be impressive. But the trend data does not support the alamist position. After all, the question is not “are there extreme weather events?’. The questions is are these events increasing in any measurable way? The only evidence you have provided is that they are not.

As most of us have noted, AGW theory should lead to fewer storms. The amplification of warming at the poles creates less differences in temperatures. It’s that difference that fuels many storms. But hey, why let facts get in the way of some good propaganda.

Also, Mike’s analogy of a car engine is so poor it makes one wonder about his critical thinking abilities. Car engines are built by people. They are completely understood. There a few, if any, unknowns that come into play. Climate is basically a huge unknown. New insights occur yearly. To claim an expert in climate knows as much about climate as as expert mechanic knows about engines is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard.

You have less risk of getting ripped off asking several qualified mechanics then asking an untrained person. And it is safer to risk getting ripped off on occasion than to risk causing an accident. There is no risk free path. If it turns out the scientists are wrong, and we acted to reduce GHG emissions, we will have wasted money. If it turns out they are right and we do nothing, we are in deep trouble. It is about balancing relative risks.

Your charge of corruption on the scientists is not supported by the reviews of several independent commissions. Even if some scientists were found to be corrupt it would be hard to explain how scientists from every major country where all bought off. And scientists do not keep the grant money they get. They are mostly on salary.

I was asked about an up tick in extreme weather. It remains to be seen if they fit into a statistically robust climate pattern over time. The evidence I gave is from fairly mainstream sources and would be accepted as evidence (not as proof) in most contexts. You are free to be skeptical, and should be, until more definitive studies become available. But there is a difference between healthly skepticism and paranoidal cynicism.

Dr. Krugman, why is the x axis unlabeled? Please insert the exact numbers your hours of research have determined are appropriate. Use whatever scale you want C or F. Inquiring minds want to know exactly where the change in slope in your distribution occurs from positive to negative. What is the ideal temperature? Please round to the nearest .ooox. Thanks in advance for your scholarly addition to the climate debate. /sarc

What “independent commissions”? When you tell a bald faced lie like that around here people notice. Commissions made up of former coworkers that refuse to even interview anyone other than the culprits about the facts of the case? are those the commissions you want us to accept.

Your claim that if the “scientists” (which is a mislabel) “…are right and we do nothing, we are in deep trouble” is a howler. Please give us some data that suggests warmer is worse in any practical way? More than half of the land in the Northern Hemisphere is North of me. More than 90% of the population is South of me. Today we have a balmy day at -20C. Human beings simply don’t agree with you. If you are worried about the heat go and live in the Yukon or Yakutia; land is cheap, heck you can afford beach property! If you want to farm there is a lot of farmland in Greenland that has been abandoned.

As for other life on the Earth . Warmer is better across the board in terms of diversity fecundity, pretty much any rational measure. If you have evidence otherwise I wait to hear it.

I was asked about an up tick in extreme weather. It remains to be seen if they fit into a statistically robust climate pattern over time. The evidence I gave is from fairly mainstream sources and would be accepted as evidence (not as proof) in most contexts.

The problem with your articles is that none provided evidence of an uptick in extreme weather. The first article list a bunch of record highs closely grouped during the last summer when the El Nino was at full strength. The Russian heat wave was explained by NOAA thusly:

There is strong evidence that the immediate cause can be placed at the doorstep of an extreme pattern of atmospheric winds—widely referred to as blocking. In the situation of anticyclonic blocking such as developed over western Russia in early July 2010, the normal west-to-east movement of weather systems is inhibited, with the center of a blocking experiencing persistently quiescent weather.

Blocks are not an uncommon occurrence over Eurasia in summer, with a episodes of July blocking in the region between 0-60ºE evident during the past half century. This region is vulnerable to episodes of blocking owing to physical factors related to the region’s location downstream of the Atlantic westerly jet.

Where are the “unprecedented” record highs so far in this Northern Hemisphere winter? One would expect that if record highs in summer were caused by climate warming, then there should be an equivalent amount of record highs set during the winters as well.

So far for February, all the record highs in the US are clustered around South Florida, and are hardly extreme, and actually misleading. For example, Fort Myers set a record high for 3 Feb of 85F; however, the record high for the city is 92F — so is it really significant that a high was set on a particular day that is 7F less then the record for the month? I don’t see it as statistically significant.

There have been several comments about the ‘shape’ of the distribution, in addition to considering a ‘shift’ in the distribution shown in the graph.

Average recorded temperature (Taverage) is determined from the maximum (Tmax) and minimum (Tmin). If there was a shift in one or the other, it would affect both the average value and the ‘shape’ of the distribution.

For example, if the minimum values shifted to ‘less cold’, it would shift the average up a bit, without necessarily shifting the Tmax values. The Krugman figures assume that everything shifts together, but there is some indication that Tmin’s have shifted up without the Tmax values changing concurrently.

Less Cold on the low end does not necessarily make it More Hot on the upper side of the curve.

Taking that thought another step, if extreme weather events are driven by differences in temperature, then moving Tmin and Tmax closer together would argue for LESS extreme weather, not more. At a qualitative level, a Tmin shift would be consistent with a shift in average temperature, but also with reduced ACE trends.

Professor Krugman has produced a scary little graphic showing that small trends in global warming/slight increases global temperature will shift the “probablity density curve” of storm frequency and thereby dramatically increase the area under the tail of the curve outside the threshold – and put us all in a bunch of danger. We’ll be subject to the insatiable whims of “extreme events.”

It’s a nice story, intended for nuanced, smart, nice people – our Ivy-Educated Elite Opinion Leaders (IEEOLs) – who know that small antecedants can have large concequences. Krugman knows that his IEEOLs understand the concept: while prepping at Choate, a few points in SAT score or a couple basis-points in GPA can mean the difference between Yale and (gasp!) Southern Connecticut State University. A foul wind blows North out of New Haven, and the Eli tragically becomes the Owl. Sad. If we could have done something but, instead, sat idly by? Tragic…

The problems with Krugman’s cute little example are legion, as are the reasons for the IEEOLs overestimation of their own knowledge of Everything (a later rant). First of all, his curve assumes there is actually a known relationship between global warming and the frequency of storms. For the timeframe from 1970 to the present, plot 12-month average global temperature data on top of the storm frequency data above, and you’ll see temperatures flat through the mid-1970s, then increase steadily and significantly through the mid-1990s, then level off with slight, but statistically insignificant, increases to the present.

Contrast the temperature plot with the storm frequency plot above – seasonal fluctuations, with several cyclical up-and-down trends (tied to el Nino and la Nina). With the temperature data we have a pattern of: flat-up-strongly-flat. And we’re comparing that to the weak pattern of: down-up-down-up-down-up-down seen in the storm data. Sure. Those are correlated…

Those 100% reliant on public funding for their research/livelihood, (and for their invitations to conferences in exotic places soon to be ravaged by global warming) know our IEEOLs understand the whole small-things-lead-to-big-results thing. And they also know that the IEEOLs think they know everything – or can learn everything as soon as other IEEOLs tell them what’s what. So the researchers milk both the understanding & cluelessness of the IEEOLs to collect all the grant money, all the CNN face-time, and all the Fijian ‘hot stone’ exfolliation rituals (combined with a hydrating Coconut Sugar Body Glow – of course!) at the best tropical spas soon to be swallowed by Al Gore’s angry sea…

Too bad, that in this case, the idea is just bunk.

Chalk one up for the intellectually dishonest leading the blind…

(Sorry to any SCSU Owls out there, but the school’s location between Choate and Yale made it an unavoidable target. And I’m an SCSU grad, so I can indirectly hate on the school all I want…)

“Mike says:
February 8, 2011 at 8:32 pm
“[ryanm: how do you quantify a recent “uptick” — just asking]” This was in response to my comment above @February 8, 2011 at 6:27 pm. A few others asked this as well. Below are some examples.

The 2010 heat wave: 7 excruciating climate records
Los Angelenos have been burning up — but they’re not the only ones who have endured unprecedented temperatures this past year
posted on September 28, 2010, at 11:22 AM”

In the Midwest and Northeast snow and extreme cold temperatures have been the rule in Winter.
How Mike can ignore these facts and use a two week heatwave, ( Weather=Climate, it’s ok when you do it right ?) to justify the outrageous position that it provides evidence of “Globalized Warming”, and its fictitious generalized, self-contradictory, dangers,
while completely ignoring the far more persistent and far more dangerous LOW winter temperatures, I cannot understand.

“paranoidal cynicism” That seems to be the most common trait I find among warmists…now why is that?

You guys are so hell-bent on thinking that man is causing all change in the climate, and anyone who does not toe the line of the “great and powerful OZ” is ostracized, risks losing their funds, and above all else is hampered by peer review policies that make their work take twice as long.

I tend to think that you insult sceptics and subconsciously realize that you exhibit the same characteristics you accuse us of. Deniers? Yes, you deny the scientific method and refuse to refute the null hypothesis on your theory. No amount of weather data will ever prove your theory, the only thing that will is what proves any other theory in science…refute the null hypothesis that any climate change is not natural. go do that and then come back here with policy decisions. Until then, you are just being a paranoid cynic.

Trenberth and Krugman, the blind leading the blind. The global man made warming theory is already dead, and this is because their models have got the entire atmospheric circulation ass backwords. They predicted over time the atmospheric circulation would evolve into an ever increasing +AO ,well it has been evolving into an ever increasing -AO. Next they predicted a lower tropospheric hot spot over the equator, in response to positive feedbacks with water vapor, due to an increase in CO2, that has not happened. Third they said out going long wave radiation would decrease, that has been on the increase. Fourth ,they said less extremes in weather ,we are having more extremes in weather.

THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING OF GLOBAL COOLING AND THIS WILL BE KNOWN AS THE DECADE OF GLOBAL COOLING.
,

‘I was asked about an up tick in extreme weather. It remains to be seen if they fit into a statistically robust climate pattern over time. The evidence I gave is from fairly mainstream sources and would be accepted as evidence (not as proof) in most contexts. You are free to be skeptical, and should be, until more definitive studies become available. But there is a difference between healthly skepticism and paranoidal cynicism. ‘

Dear Mike:

From your quote I take it that you accept the evidence that you provided that floods are not on the increase?
I further take it that you are concerned by the reported extreem heat events but have no evidence on their rate of occurance?
And finally it seems that you realize that some scientists have speculated that there is an increase in in world wide wether events. But, it seems that you, like me are still lacking hard real world data or research which documents this speculated increase.

The difference is that even though you lack evidence you place what appears to be a religions faith that such speculations are true. While I and many like me use this lack of evidence combined with hard evidence such as what you provided on lack of increase in rates of floods as cause for honest doubt and further study. Your faith that hard evidence will follow the speculations appears to be misplaced. As the hard evidence so far (even that that you provided) is aginst your faith.

Perhaps is is time for you to leave childhood and look with the eyes of an adult at this issue. Set aside your misplaced faith and look for facts. Stop being impressed with authoritive specualtions.

The normal with moving mean picture is valid in some circumstances, but not in this one. That is because extreme weather isn’t simply a matter of rolling the dice and lucking out on an extra hot day; or an extra rainy one. Extreme weather is associated with particular discrete atmospheric features or events – hurricanes – cyclones – blizzards – thunderstorms. It is the frequency of these events that completely determines the frequency of extreme weather.

To work out whether extreme events are going to be more likely if the world warms slightly we must undertake a completely different kind of analysis. We must look at how thunderstorms or hurricanes or blizzards arise – the conditions prerequisite to their formation – and ask whether small change in the climate will favor those conditions and make those events more frequent.

The details will vary depending on the weather event under consideration, but a useful generalisation is that extreme weather events are triggered by differences not by absolutes. It is only when you have bodies of air with markedly different temperature or humidity in close proximity that extreme weather events are likely. So if the world were to warm evenly we would not expect the frequency of extreme weather events to change. And if in warming the atmosphere were to become more uniform then extreme weather events would indeed become less common.

Note that most of the models for warming predict that it is the cold places in the world that will warm the most. I don’t trust the models, however that is actually what we have seen in the measured warming too, with the bulk of it happening at the north pole and in winter and at night. It is therefore quite possible that the differences which trigger extreme weather may be becoming less common. The hurricane energy graph seems to support this.

Of course if you live in Queensland you might not be thinking this right now. However the reason for their clobbering is well understood – one of the most intense Nina’s in a long time.

Distinguished scholar, Dr Thomas Sowell distinguishes between intelligence and intellect on page 2 of his treatise, “Intellectuals and Society” (Basic Books, 2009) as follows:
“The capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas is enough to define intellect but not enough to encompass intelligence, which involves combining intellect with judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory factors and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that emerges. Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect. Wisdom is the rarest quality of all — the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce coherent understanding. Wisdom is the fulfillment of the ancient admonition, “With all your getting, get understanding.” Wisdom requires self-discipline and an understanding of the realities of the world, including the limitations of one’s own experience and of reason itself. The opposite of intellect is dullness or slowness, but the opposite of wisdom is foolishness, which is far more dangerous.”
“George Orwell said that some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them, for no ordinary man could be such a fool. The record of twentieth century intellectuals is especially appalling in this regard. Scarcely a mass-murdering dictator of the twentieth century was without his intellectual supporters, not simply in his own country, but also in foreign democracies, where people are free to say whatever they wished. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler all had admirers, defenders, and
apologists among the intelligentsia in Western democratic nations, despite the fact that each of these dictators ended up killing people of their own country on a scale unprecedented even by despotic regimes that preceded them.”

Applying the foregoing to Krugman, and Obama also, we have persons who are have considerable intellect, but lack the experience and judgment to qualify them as intellectuals except within scope of their specific expertise, economist and community organizer respectively. They both have the qualifications for fools.

Distinguished scholar, Dr Thomas Sowell distinguishes between intelligence and intellect on page 2 of his treatise, “Intellectuals and Society” (Basic Books, 2009) as follows:
“The capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas is enough to define intellect but not enough to encompass intelligence, which involves combining intellect with judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory factors and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that emerges. Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect. Wisdom is the rarest quality of all — the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce coherent understanding. Wisdom is the fulfillment of the ancient admonition, “With all your getting, get understanding.” Wisdom requires self-discipline and an understanding of the realities of the world, including the limitations of one’s own experience and of reason itself. The opposite of intellect is dullness or slowness, but the opposite of wisdom is foolishness, which is far more dangerous.”
“George Orwell said that some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them, for no ordinary man could be such a fool. The record of twentieth century intellectuals is especially appalling in this regard. Scarcely a mass-murdering dictator of the twentieth century was without his intellectual supporters, not simply in his own country, but also in foreign democracies, where people are free to say whatever they wished. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler all had admirers, defenders, and
apologists among the intelligentsia in Western democratic nations, despite the fact that each of these dictators ended up killing people of their own country on a scale unprecedented even by despotic regimes that preceded them.”

Applying the foregoing to Krugman, and Obama also, we have persons who are have considerable intellect, but lack the experience and judgment to qualify them as intellectuals except within scope of their specific expertise, economist and community organizer respectively. They do have the qualifications for fools.

At least the Wizard of Oz, when his curtain was yanked back, had the decency and sense to ‘fess up, and try and give pragmatic coping advice. Warmists, OTOH, become furious, insist the curtain is still there, continue to make grandiose magical passes with their wands, clutch their rich robes even more tightly about their rapidly cooling bodies, and insist that the magic is still there, all real. And sneer at mere pragmatic coping options, insisting that only the Magic of CO2 can save us.

Hilarious for a while, but has gotten real old and tiresome by now. Time for the Shillelagh Solution?

While I’m sure Krugman thinks he’s smarter than the “masses” he has the same common affliction. We build our homes in flood plains a couple of years after the previous flood, and a few years later, when we awaken to see our furniture afloat in the living room, we wonder how that could have happened. … and then we rebuild in the same place. It’s a well known problem – SMS – (short memory syndrome), and in the case of climate our memories are limited to experiences obtained during a really short life span. Most of us haven’t bothered to review thousands of years of climate history, which is necessary to gain some perspective on that issue.

However, can’t blame the guy too much. After all, there’s no shortage of climate scientists out there who, in spite of their education and advanced degrees, also find it impossible to admit that, not too long ago, there was a period of several hundred years, commonly referred to as the MWP.

Richard M says: February 9, 2011 at 7:22 am
Richard,
You raise a fair point. Thank you! If you replace the car mechanic with a medical doctor then the analogy holds better.

Why would you want to ask a medical doctor about your car engine? ;)

Seriously, your analogy still is poor. A medical doctor usually has available hundreds if not thousands of actual case studies where treatments have been tried. With climate we have NONE. The problem is that our so-called climate experts are not experts in the same sense as medical doctors or experts in other fields. A better analogy would be particle physicists trying to understand string theory and they are not having very much success either. It’s a b*tch to try and understand something when you have no idea if you have 1%, 10% or 90% of the required facts. The problem with AGW believers is they think the number is 90% (or higher). Skeptics don’t believe it’s anywhere near that high.

Let’s say for a second you have an incredibly large value for n and an average of 2. You predict that this large dataset will change such that the average will now be 3. This would mean more departures in the positive direction, and less in the negative direction. Pretty simple right? But if you predict the dataset will be 3, and become more extreme then you start to have issues. Imagine creating a dataset that is both extreme and trending upwards. You’re gonna have a lot of positive aberrations in this dataset if you don’t change the number of observations. This is essentially the main argument from AGWers now. Not just warm weather, extreme weather, but also warmer. So why don’t they just analyze the temperature range to see how daily min/max is trending?

And by abberations, I do mean those events that fall outside of a standard deviation. If you increase those events, you also flatten the probability curve (assuming you keep # of observations the same again), but I’ll leave well enough alone on the first post.

Wouldn’t an increase in ‘extreme’ events mean the probability curve is wrong? If you expect it to get warmer, the p curve should move towards the warmer temperatures, making cooler events less likely. If the curve flattens when you spend more time making observations, I would say that is a pretty good sign your original probability estimates are not right.

Note that Krugman shows a Gaussian distribution for weather events and/or climate. Is there anything out there that shows that weather events follow such a distribution? Or that miniscule increases in temperature would cause the curve to shift by one to two standard deviations? Economists seem to put bell curves everywhere because they appear scientific. But I think that the truth is that weather and climate are very chaotic, which is one reason for many of the failings in climate models (including the total absense of predictive capacity).

As the AGW cult collapses and loses members that have been successfully de-programmed either on their own intelligence or with the help of concerned friends and family, we should see more of these authoritative Cardinal figures appearing on the scene in an attempt to slow the mass exit, you can bet on it!

Congrats, your prediction is fulfilled in less than 48 hrs. According to last night’s “Lateline” with Tony Jones, Tim Flannery is all set to educate ignorant Australians and even “debate with deniers” in public. Well, he has one adherent so far: Mr “Never Allow a Pertinent Question” Jones himself.

I’d think that blizzards would be extreme events at the other end of the probability distribution caused by low temperatures. So swinging the probability distribution away from them would make them less probable, which kind of contradicts recent observations and his arguement.